WHY ART REQUIRES LOW RENTS

Love and Squalor in the Underground Theater

The bummer about cities becoming too wealthy is that it drives all the art and artists out — the people willing to do projects for nothing in dingy garages and warehouses; to do them for the sake of art and entertainment on their own dime, with little or no encouragement from the rest of the world.  Nobody but the techies and the lawyers around San Francisco make enough money from work to survive anymore, let alone underwrite renegade cultural activities.  The soul of the city is largely dead now, save some fringe Goth and bondage enclaves. I’m not even sure if it’s gay anymore.  The Virgin of Guadalupe once watched over the Latino car clubs of the Mission District; I hear even she got driven out by the rent prices and had to move to Hayward. 

I was able to do plays in San Francisco in the late eighties - early nineties because I was able to support myself by working in a nightclub as a Jägermeister shot nurse.  I was twenty-two and living 

on lower Haight street in a cruddy ground-level apartment with two other black-clad roommate girls from the nightclub, who sort of hated me for reasons that were unclear.  I had the side bedroom with a view of an abandoned bathtub between our house and the next. 

I had agreed to write a puppet theater trilogy over the summer - 3 plays in 3 months - called Bitzy La Fever’s Kingdom of Passion.  It was a kicky concept:  I played Bitzy La Fever, a middle-aged Southern woman who is a romance novelist.  I had a little rubber chihuahua that I animated with one hand, on my lap.  Bitzy is bored of her life and husband Karl, so she retreats into her own fantasy world of the Italian dolce vita, for which I designed a series of puppets that were made by my partner in the project, a very talented builder and puppeteer named Chrystene.  The main puppet was Donaldo Don Romano, Italian film director.   In order to have his hands gesticulate wildly, we gave him very expressive hands and put springs on his wrists.  Next came his girlfriend, the wild and impetuous Italian starlet Gazelle Diamondo, who was constantly tormenting her boyfriend the filmmaker with her outrageous, drunken behavior.  Gazelle looked like a Muppet version of Zsa-Zsa Gabor with a bleach blonde beehive and a tiny pink satin cocktail dress.  She always had a champagne flute in her hand and would always cackle “Ha-ha-ha!” 

The Iago of the play was Nunzio, a diabolical, unethical, entirely perverse Italian dwarf.  I had this puppet based on an unintentionally terrifying clown doll that a friend had given to me, and Chrystene cast and molded actual rubber chicken feet for his hands. 

The play was gleefully blasphemous; unto that end we had a seven- foot priest puppet named Father Furillo, who would hear Gazelle’s harrowing confessions and pleasure himself violently, finally ejaculating some viscous fluid out of a catheter. 

I can only remember spotty things about the plays — the whole experience was so nonstop it went by in a whirlwind.  When I wasn’t performing or rehearsing I was writing the next installment. 

 At one point we made an actual 16mm film, that was to have been directed by Donaldo Don Romano — called “Vaticannibal.”  It was a very Rocky Horrorish film, with a mouth chewing bloody meat while a Latin mass was recited underneath.  There may or may not have been a Gregorian choir.  Donaldo and Gazelle go to the premiere of Vaticannibal and it is considered so obscene and disgusting by the Cannes audience they are chased out of the theater, to the delight of the terrible Nunzio.  

One play had a visit from the Pope - so we made a finger Pope. A finger Pope-et. “Your Holiness, you are so very small,” said Father Furillo to the tiny, squeaky Pope.  In another scene, Donaldo is annoyed enough with Gazelle to call her a “spit-shined go-go tart.” 

One of the best artmaking experiences I had doing this trilogy was a second film that we had to make for the third part of the trilogy, some of which for some reason takes place in an Asian whorehouse.  Instead of using puppets, we instead used blow-up Asian sex dolls, (one of whom we covered entirely in tattoos), and walked around behind them, manipulating them in ninja costumes with dark hoods that entirely covered our faces.  To my great embarrassment, one of the blow-up dolls actually said, “Oh Joe, me so ho-nee,”  but to my credit, it wasn’t yet the worldwide cliché it eventually became. 

There was also a puppet named Bat Kwok, who was the Chinese owner of the front restaurant attached to the Asian brothel.  I can’t remember who did his voice in a gratuitous Asian accent, but suffice to say that the play could not be mounted today, probably, without getting pipe-bombed by the Asian Anti-Defamation league, or something. 

The producer, the legendary nightclub impresario Jeogh Bullock, and his whip-sharp and comely paramour, the lovely Marcia Crosby walked Chrystene and me down the street to a closed nightclub that, at that point, was called the Oasis Lounge.   At that time, there was an actual swimming pool in the back, which we all joked (but secretly suspected) was teeming with hepatitis.

It was a typical 50-degree evening when we all got into our ninja suits and climbed into the unheated pool of the Oasis in order to film the Asian blowup doll-prostitute water ballet.  We were all drinking swigs of vodka strictly for the heat.  As four of us were floundering around in 50 degree water, entirely hooded and clothed, manipulating these inflatable women with their lurid, circular red mouths and choreographing a synchronized routine for them for around 2 hours, it struck me how utterly fucking lucky I was to be alive, weird, and living in the city.  Something large and generous felt realized in me. I knew at that moment I was definitely making art.  There was certainly no other word for it. 

Like National Lampoon in the eighties, the Bitzy la Fever’s Kingdom of Passion Trilogy probably looks absolutely disgraceful in the light of  today’s standards.  But everyone is lying if they don’t say that some disgraceful shit is genuinely funny. Comedy is quite defanged without a smattering of the rude — and rudeness, I’m sorry to say, is a neighborhood that has been entirely razed to build luxury condominiums.  You really can’t get away with art anymore. 

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “The Epidemic,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2020